Politics

In its "green" issue this week, The New Republic features an excerpt from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger's new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Their basic point is that the emphasis of the political debate is all wrong. I'm not sure they really understand how things are shaping up, but they're saying that politicians should spend less "time" talking about regulatory approaches, and more time reiterating the importance of innovation. This gives pretty short shrift to the fact that a carbon tax (or cap-and-trade program that auctions credits) is basically an in-kind subsidy to clean energy. But still, regulation and direct subsidies aren't mutually exclusive, and I think the reason you don't hear a lot of hand-wringing about subsidies for green R&D is that securing real (as opposed to de facto) subsidies -- in any future climate change bill -- to well-positioned clean energy companies will be the easy part.* * Keep in mind that part of the reason this will be easy is that the biggest subsidy winner will almost certainly be King Coal, who will almost without a doubt receive billions and billions of dollars to refine and implement carbon capture and sequestration technology across the country and, perhaps, the entire world.

I’m in a session about “Energy, Climate Change & Resource Nationalism” with General Bruce Wright, commander of U.S. Air Force in Japan, and Dr. Liam Fox, Shadow Secretary of State of Defence and Member of …

Long-standing shared love for voluntary standards aside, businesses and manufacturers have begun asking the Bush administration to begin regulating industry’s health- and planet-ruining ways. A variety of factors have contributed to the turnaround, including tougher …

White House science advisor, on the options available for addressing climate change: You only have two choices; you either have advanced technologies and get them into the marketplace, or you shut down your economies and …

Every few months, if you pay close enough attention, you'll discover new and exciting ways the Bush administration is gumming up the machines of scientific inquiry. This will happen basically every time the likely results of a particular line of inquiry will be at odds with public policy as determined by the Bush administration. It's an elegant system. And as a result, there's a quick and dirty way to find examples of meddling. For instance, while you're unlikely to find meddling in biotechnological research (non-stem cell), most government-funded environmental research will eventually be sabotaged in some way. That's the basic pattern. The latest example comes to us from the good people at The New York Times: An effort by the Bush administration to improve federal climate research has answered some questions but lacks a focus on impacts of changing conditions and informing those who would be most affected, a panel of experts has found ... [T]he report cited more problems than successes in the government's research program. Of the $1.7 billion spent by the [Climate Change Science Program] on climate research each year, only about $25 million to $30 million has gone to studies of how climate change will affect human affairs, for better or worse, the report said ... Only two of the program's 21 planned overarching reports on specific climate issues have been published in final form; only three more are in the final draft stage. And not enough effort has gone to translating advances in climate science into information that is useful to local elected officials, farmers, water managers and others who may potentially be affected by climate shifts, whatever their cause, the panel found ... A major hindrance to progress, the panel's report said, is that the climate program's director and subordinates lack the authority to determine how money is spent. And so on. And so on. And so on.

When one rides a bicycle, one is able to transport oneself from place to place — thus, one might call a bicycle “transportation.” But not if one is U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters. Despite the …